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I’m excited to announce that MarketingBlog.NET has been listed by OnlineColleges.net, as one of the 80 essential blogs for the modern day marketing student. Click here to find where we sit in list below. We’re specifically listed under Online Marketing where they instruct students to “follow these blogs to learn about the latest in online marketing”.

80 Essential Blogs for the Modern-Day Marketing Student

These days, marketing has changed by leaps and bounds. If you can’t keep up with learning the latest strategies, you simply can’t keep up. Check out these blogs to stay on top of the essentials in modern day marketing.

New to the online space? Not sure where to start marketing your business, or even how? Well that’s okay…because you’re not alone. This article is geared towards small business new to online space, bringing them up to speed on what’s out there and how they can take full advantage everything .

Unlike traditional marketing, the internet broadens the reach between businesses and consumers. Lower costs, mass distribution and instant responses are but a few benefits to taking your campaigns online. The beauty of the internet is that it provides many unique ways of capturing your audience by tying together both the creative and technical aspects of design and development. Below you will find a basic introduction to the many forms Online Marketing and what you should take advantage of. If you’re business is not online, you should look into testing some of the practices introduced below. For those of you familiar with the online space, consider this a refresher.

SETTINGS GOALS

Online marketing takes goal setting very seriously. Without a goal, how can you measure success? There’s so much information you can collect about your website users: Hits, Clicks, Views, Purchases, etc…but which of those are most important to you must be defined before you begin a campaign. For example, let’s assume you’re trying to sell shoes. If your site generates 1,000 hits a day, and you didn’t sell a shoe, then you weren’t successful. Now, let’s assume your website is an online newspaper and your goal is to get readers. In that case, a 1,000 hits a day is a great thing. Everything is relative. Set your goals early on so as to not get distracted.

SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING (SEM)

As the internet became more popular in the 90’s, search engines were created to help individuals locate information more efficiently on the internet. Considering the amount of new information published daily, search engines were relied more heavily upon in order to help direct traffic. Using “spiders” and “crawlers” sent into cyberspace, search engines were/are able to categorize websites and rank them. If you go to a search engine and type in “CAMERA”, what comes up is probably the most “relevant” result to that word. Unfortunately there are millions of sites competing to get to the top of that list. This is where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes into play. In what could be an entire article in itself, SEO is the process of improving the amount and quality of traffic to your site from organic searches within search engines. There’s no cost to get listed naturally in Google, Yahoo and MSN and your goal should be to rank high for any relevant searches. There are free tools out there to help you optimize your website and I would highly suggest using Google Webmaster as a starter.

Search Engine Optimization allows you to drive customers to your website simply by showing up in their searches. However, there is another route you can take to drive traffic to your website, but you’ll have to pay for it. Pay-Per-Click advertising was instituded by search engines to drive revenue on their sites. Businesses and individuals could sponsor links at the top of search results in order to increase the chance of someone clicking their link, and they would pay for every click. Yahoo! Search Marketing and Google AdWords are two popular examples of this type of marketing. This became the primary business model and source of income for search engines.

BANNER ADS

Another more traditional form of marketing is banner ads. Similar to driving down the freeway and passing oversized billboards, these ads are very visual and in-your-face. Located either at the top or on the sides of websites (aka: Skyscraper Ads), these ads follow both Pay-Per-Click and the more traditional Pay-Per-View models. With the advances in online technologies, these ads have been increasing the way audiences interact with them. For those of you who have seen the “click the monkey to win a FREE I-POD”, you know exactly what I mean. Not every banner ad is interactive, but there are many variations and the options are nearly endless.

E-MAIL MARKETING

If you are considering direct-marketing or have experience using snail-mail in some form, E-mail marketing is the electronic approach. Companies can benefit from e-mail marketing in many different ways:

Fast- Will arrive in their inbox within 30 seconds, depending on the service

Mass Distribution- Global Reach

ROI Tracking- You can track successful delivery’s, who opened the e-mails and what links they clicked

“It’s Eco-Friendly- No trees will be harmed in spreading your message (as with this post!)” – Sam Shron, Acxiom Digital.

Considering most internet users check or send e-mails every single day, this is a highly effective form of reaching mass audience effectively. BEWARE!! This form of marketing is also highly controversial and must be done the right way or not at all. Please refer over to the CAN SPAM ACT OF 2003. The list of requirements are very specific including an unsubscribe button, who you send it to, how you send it and more. As a result, many businesses use Agency’s to handle their e-mail marketing efforts.

SOCIAL MEDIA (WEB2.0)

The popularity of social media created an entirely new type of effective marketing that has been increasingly growing stronger year by year. Why? Well, for one, considering the amount of personal information that users put online, advertisers are able to better understand who they’re advertising to and what is more likely to be effective. Within social media, you’ll find a vast amount of options:

Your campaign can go from zero to hero all because one individual liked the ad and sent it to all of his friends. Just take a look at the recent Susan Boyle video which has gained global success, with over 145,000,000+ views online. The video was featured on blogs and social networks and it was all FREE marketing. That’s the power of the internet and Social Media. But it doesn’t stop there. You can use the social networks to interact with potential customers and gain insights unlike ever before. I highly suggest you research this type of marketing and get involved any way you can. Your efforts will be pay off and the results could be endless!

ANALYTICS

As I stressed in my last article for HP, Free Website Essentials 101: The information you can collect about your visitors is extremely valuable. The only downside is the amount of information can be overwhelming. Without a question, analytics is the double-edged sword of Online Marketing. Set a benchmark for yourself and use analytics software to help define whether or not you’re reaching pre-assigned goals. Google Analytics has an internal feature to help track visitors and goal reaching. By understanding such things as, source of traffic and content-overview, you’ll be able to help your site evolve into a stronger source of business…and again, this software free, so there’s no reason to pass it up.

LinkedIn, Digg, Facebook, YouTube and Blogging are mainstream social media tools. On top of that list, Twitter comes in as one of the most often written about social media tools. Commonly, popular tools end up having tools built to help make them more eficient. Then tools are built to agregate those tools, and then bloggers come along and write about the “Top Tools” our there. I’ll be honest, there have been 100’s of posts claiming that they “KNOW” the top twitter tools. Unfortunately, there are 100’s of tools out there which makes it that much harder to make Tweeting a more efficient and profitable process. I have had an (@RedRussak) account for the purpose spreading the word on article, products and events. Unfortunately, I have only touched the very tip of the iceberg, but feel after I finish writing this article, that may change.

Mashable.com published an article in Fall 2007, full of 60+ Twitter tools. In Spring 2008, they published 140+ more tools, adding more to the cluttered tool list. Around the same time, TopRankBlog.com (aka: MarketingBlog.com…my “competition”), put together their own list of 5 New Twitter Tools You Should Know About. Finally, I came across a recently updated and short list of essential twitter tools. Senior Director of Online Marketing at Folica.com, Kieran Hawe has had over 10+ years of online marketing experience, and over 2+ years of Twitter experience under the alias “@khawe“. He has tried just about every Twitter tool out there, and ove time has settled on a list of current Twitter tools he prefers to use through out his day. Coming directly from his blog Webtribution.com, here’s Kieran’s List:

iPhone: When i first got my iPhone I started using Twitterrific, but slowly became annoyed with its UX and functionality. I tried a couple of other apps but eventually settled on TwitterFon – which I have been using ever since.

BlackBerry: Since I have an iPhone the need to use my BlackBerry on a regular basis has diminished. However, the only app I have used – and would recommend – is TwitterBerry.

Desktop Client: I was a big fan of Twirl for a long time but eventually moved on to TweetDeck. TweetDeck has been fairly stable for me since I started using it, plus the grouping of friends and UI really can’t be beat.

URL Shortener: You can’t use Twitter on a regular basis and not have a preferred URL shortener – mine is Bit.ly. Bit.ly provides the basic functionality you need but with click tracking, great tool to see which of your tweets people are actually interested in.

Twitter Management: Since I have multiple Twitter accounts (personal, professional, etc) I use SplitTweet to manage them all – great tool to send out one Tweet to any / all accounts without logging into each one separately.

Page Tweet: Say you are reading something on a website that you feel your Twitter audience would appreciate / like, instead of copying the URL and title of the article I use TwitThis to automatically share the contents with my followers.

WordPress Plugin: I have used just about every Twitter WordPress plugin out there and have had some issue or another with all of them. The Twitter Tools plugin isn’t perfect but it does what I need (auto post to Twitter blog posts and pull in Twitter feeds) and is fairly stable.

Something that hasn’t been mentioned is that you can interface your facebook status with twitter if you want to spread the word across both networks. It works and helps drive traffic. That’s my 2 cents. I have a feeling there are going to be new twitter tool “top 10 lists” as more supportive tools are created. For now, test the Tools and follow me on Twitter @RedRussak.